Mobile devices, in place of many conventional electronic devices, are widely applied in our daily life, offering unprecedented user experiences due to their readily accessible and extremely accommodating characteristics. For instance, laptop computers are able to implement most functions of desktop computers, while allowing users to work anywhere. Tablets and smart phones constantly update users with useful information (e.g., emails, messages, weather, and stock price), serve their entertainment needs, and support various educational and social activities. In particular, smart phones have become indispensable to many people's working and personal life during the past few years.
Although these mobile devices are mainly developmental products of hardware technologies, the unprecedented user experiences are largely enabled by tremendous amount of software applications developed on various mobile platforms. As of January 2013, 900,000 applications are available for downloading in the Apple App Store by iPhone or iPad users. Mobile device users may regularly install, uninstall, recover and update software applications as they need due to easy access to miscellaneous applications.
During operation, each application generates unique user information, including application configuration/settings and personal data that is stored within the mobile device. Data management of the user information could impose a challenge on the mobile device during both courses of operating and uninstalling the corresponding application. In particular, if the user information is mistakenly deleted upon uninstallation, it may not be recoverable when the application is reinstalled, and the loss of the user information may seriously comprise the user experience of the recovered application in the future. Shared by other electronic devices, this information management problem is more pronounced in mobile devices, because these devices normally involve more frequent operations on software applications.
As a solution, a backup plug-in is integrated in another application to receive from the application a message that indicates an uninstalling action. This other application passively waits for the message and subsequently initializes to back up the user information associated with the uninstalled application. However, the uninstalled application oftentimes does not realize a need to send the message for actively inducing the backup process, and therefore, fails to send the necessary message. Not receiving this message, the other application is blind to the ongoing uninstallation process, and thus, fails to back up the user information of the uninstalled application. Therefore, a need exists to improve data management of software applications particularly during the course of application uninstallation and recovery.